Hi Mark,
I may be wrong, but........
Am I right in guessing that you transferred an existing array from a Promise
RAID controller to the ITE RAID controller on this new motherboard?
Did you wipe the drives and re-create a NEW array from scratch? - AFAIK,
There's no guarantee that an existing array will still work after moving it
to a different controller chipset. I have also heard that in some cases,
even a simple upgrade of a RAID controller's BIOS can sometimes render any
existing arrays unusable.
Did you do a clean install of Windows XP? - Again, usually a very good idea
when changing the motherboard, especially when changing hard drive
controllers. An existing install of XP will usually refuse to boot if the
hard drive controller setup has been changed.
Another thing, even on motherboards that use an onboard Promise RAID
controller, the driver for the onboard Promise RAID is different to the one
used for a PCI card Promise RAID controller. The PCI card RAID driver will
not work for the onboard RAID chip, and vice-versa.
I'm guessing that if you re-created the array from scratch and did a clean
re-install of Windows using the ITE RAID drivers, that you probably wouldn't
have had any problems.
My apologies if I'm barking up the wrong tree with the above.....
Regarding the Dual-Bios problem, I myself have been wondering about the
effectiveness of the Gigabyte software based Dual-BIOS function.
How is the Bios software going to determine that it is corrupt, if the Bios
itself is so totally screwed up that the board can't boot at all.
The Dual-Bios routines must be part of the Boot-Block BIOS that is normally
not overwritten during a flash upgrade. I'm guessing that your upgrade flash
must have somehow overwritten and corrupted the Boot-block portion of the
Bios as well.
I would have thought that a non-flashable fail-safe copy of the original
shipping BIOS that is selected by a jumper might be better.
That said, I have been exclusively using Dual-Bios Gigabyte boards for a few
years now and haven't had a problem with it.
On the few occasions that it has been needed, it has so far always managed
to load the backup BIOS and rescue the board.
John S.
"Mark Taylor" wrote in message
...
Hello to all
Thought I might share my very unpleasant experience with thso looking at
this board as it might help you to avoid the many long hours of frustration
I had with this mobo. My main reasons for buying this board was to use the
onboard ITE IDE RAID and the dual bios function. Both do not work properly
so I will probably scrap thsi baord and buy something else, possibly the
Aopen A4C Max.
I have just spent a week setting up this board with an existing Promise RAID
0+1 from my old system onto this board. Lets say along the way trying to get
the system to work I managed to screw up the first board and I am now onto
the second board. This was mainly to try and get the blue screen stop errors
on the ntfs.sys to stop occurring. The onboard ITE IDE RAID controller in my
opinion is a dud. I mainly bought this board as I had 4 WD 80GB 8MB 7200
drives for my previous RAID which are IDE and wanted to keep using them.
This was one of the few boards that had a RAID 0+1 IDE controller. I now
regret buying this board and I am seriously thinking of changing to
something else. I am now using it with my original Promise PCI Fasttrak TX2
RAID controller with version 33 bios and 34 driver under Windows XP Pro
which so far is quite stable. I have many years experience with PC's and
must say I think this board needs some serious BIOS work and driver upgrades
if it is going to be useful. The Dual Bios managed to fail, again one of the
main reasons for buying this board. The old version had a jumper on the
board so you could force it to use the backup BIOS but this one uses
software after the pre-BIOS boot. The BIOS EPROM's are also surface mounted
so cannot be removed for easy reflashing via an external provider so the
board became unbootable after I flashed to version f6e which was mentioned
here and thought might fix some of the instability problems. The BIOS failed
at the prepost so I could not get into the BIOS to use the software to boot
from the good backup or take the chips out and swap them so basically the
board was screwed. Whoever thought that idea up certainly did not take all
the possibilites into account. I noticed the Aopen A4C Max has two socketed
BIOS chips with a jumper on the board to force the system to boot from the
backup.
Regards
Mark
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